world music

The tradition & historical record

World music is an English phrase for styles of music from non-English-speaking countries, including quasi-traditional, intercultural, and traditional music. World music's broad nature and elasticity as a musical category pose obstacles to a universal definition, but its ethic of interest in the culturally exotic is encapsulated in Roots magazine's description of the genre as "local music from out there". There are several conflicting definitions for world music. Music that does not follow "North American or British pop and folk traditions" was given the term "world music" by music industries in Europe and North America. The term was popularized in the 1980s as a marketing category for non-Western traditional music. It has grown to include subgenres such as ethnic fusion (Clannad, Ry Cooder, Enya) and worldbeat. ¹

The term "world music" has been credited to ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, who coined it in the early 1960s at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he developed undergraduate through doctoral programs in the discipline. To enhance the learning process (John Hill), he invited more than a dozen visiting performers from Africa and Asia and began a world music concert series. The term became current in the 1980s as a marketing/classificatory device in the media and the music industry. ¹

Examples of popular forms of world music include the various forms of non-European classical music (e.g. Chinese guzheng music, Indian raga music, Tibetan chants), Eastern European folk music (e.g. the village music of the Balkans, The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices), Nordic folk music, Latin music, Indonesian music, and the many forms of folk and tribal music of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Central and South America. ¹

The broad category of world music includes isolated forms of ethnic music from diverse geographical regions. These dissimilar strains of ethnic music are commonly categorized together by virtue of their indigenous roots. Over the 20th century, the invention of sound recording, low-cost international air travel, and common access to global communication among artists and the general public have given rise to a related phenomenon called "crossover" music. Musicians from diverse cultures and locations could readily access recorded music from around the world, see and hear visiting musicians from other cultures and visit other countries to play their own music, creating a melting pot of stylistic influences. While communication technology allows greater access to obscure forms of music, the pressures of commercialization also present the risk of increasing musical homogeneity, the blurring of regional identities, and the gradual extinction of traditional local music-making practices. ¹

Since the music industry established this term, the fuller scope of what an average music consumer defines as "world" music in today's market has grown to include various blends of ethnic music tradition, style and interpretation, and derivative world music genres have been coined to represent these hybrids, such as ethnic fusion and worldbeat. Good examples of hybrid, world fusion are the Irish-West African meld of Afro Celt Sound System, the pan-cultural sound of AO Music and the jazz / Finnish folk music of Värttinä, each of which bear tinges of contemporary, Western influence—an increasingly noticeable element in the expansion genres of world music. Worldbeat and ethnic fusion can also blend specific indigenous sounds with more blatant elements of Western pop. Good examples are Paul Simon's album Graceland, on which South African mbaqanga music is heard; Peter Gabriel's work with Pakistani Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; the Deep Forest project, in which vocal loops from West Africa are blended with Western, contemporary rhythmic textures and harmony structure; and the work of Mango, who combined pop and rock music with world elements. Depending on style and context, world music can sometimes share the new-age music genre, a category that often includes ambient music and textural expressions from indigenous roots sources. Good examples are Tibetan bowls, Tuvan throat singing, Gregorian chant or Native American flute music. World music blended with new-age music is a sound loosely classified as the hybrid genre 'ethnic fusion'. ¹

The subgenre world fusion is often mistakenly assumed to refer exclusively to a blending of Western jazz fusion elements with world music. Although such a hybrid expression falls easily into the world fusion category, the suffix "fusion" in the term world fusion should not be assumed to mean jazz fusion. Western jazz combined with strong elements of world music is more accurately termed world fusion jazz, ethnic jazz or non-Western jazz. World fusion and global fusion are nearly synonymous with the genre term worldbeat, and though these are considered subgenres of popular music, they may also imply universal expressions of the more general term world music. In the 1970s and 1980s, fusion in the jazz music genre implied a blending of jazz and rock music, which is where the misleading assumption is rooted. ¹

Millie Small released "My Boy Lollipop" in 1964. Small's version was a hit, reaching number 2 both in the UK Singles Chart and in the US Billboard Hot 100. In the 1960s, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela had popular hits in the USA. In 1969 Indian musician Ravi Shankar played sitar at the Woodstock festival. In the 1970s, Manu Dibango's funky track "Soul Makossa" (1972) became a hit, and Osibisa released "Sunshine Day" (1976). Fela Kuti created Afrobeat and Femi Kuti, Seun Kuti and Tony Allen followed Fela Kuti's funky music. Salsa musicians such as José Alberto "El Canario", Ray Sepúlveda, Johnny Pacheco, Fania All-Stars, Ray Barretto, Rubén Blades, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Roberto Roena, Bobby Valentín, Eddie Palmieri, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón developed Latin music. The 1979 American ensemble Libana was incorporated by founder Susan Robbins, specifically to represent world folk traditions through chants, dance, storytelling, and musical performance. Initially consisting of 25 women, it honed down to 6 "core" members who able to travel the world, all of whom toured in America, Canada, Bulgaria, India, Greece, and Morocco. Libana has performed music of divergent cultural expressions, of the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. Libana musicians use instruments such as guitars, hammered dulcimers, ouds, bağlamas, pan flutes, charangos, djembes, davuls, frame drums, double bass, clarinets, dumbeks, accordions, and naqarehs. They continue to be active as of 2024. The Breton musician Alan Stivell pioneered the connection between traditional folk music, modern rock music and world music with his 1972 album Renaissance of the Celtic Harp. Around the same time, Welsh singer-songwriter Meic Stevens popularised Welsh folk music. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “World music”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

world music is umbrella term for traditional, indigenous, popular or art music, not following North American or British popular and folk traditions, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 40 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²